USGIF GotGeoint BlogUSGIF promotes geospatial intelligence tradecraft and a stronger community of interest between government, industry, academia, professional organizations and individuals focused on the development and application of geospatial intelligence to address national security objectives.

October 23, 2018

More and more cities are recognizing the tremendous benefits that a digital twin provides to its planners, private architects and engineers striving for compliance with city ordinances and by-laws, and for communicating with the public. I remember several years ago when the Prime Minister of Singapore in his annual National Day address included a 3D visualization of what the proposed Marina Bay towers would look like - perhaps the first time 3D visualization has been used to inform citizens on a national scale. At the Year in Infrastructure 2018 in London, Bentley announced the acquisition of Agency9, a Swedish company that provides web and mobile solutions for 3D visualization of geographic information and maps for collaboration and communication with its product CityPlanner (now OpenPlanner). With this acquistion, Bentley augments its competitive positioning relative to CityZenith (SmartWorldPro), ESRI (CityEngine), and Autodesk (Infraworks) and open source projects such as mago3D in offering a 3D visualization and analytics platform for the massive data sources required for cities including underground infrastructure.

The requirements of a comprehensive platform for city visualization and analysis for planners, architects and engineers, and the public are the ability to support OGC (KML, CityGML and others), BuildingSmart (IFC), defacto (Shape, DWG, DGN, Revit and others) and other standards such as GeoJSON making it possible to integrate GIS, CAD, and BIM (vertical and horizontal) data, content creating and editing tools, for example, to allow buildings to be extruded from footprints and rooves and facades customized, support for open data sources such as OpenStreetMap, ability to integrate satellite, aerial and ground photo imagery and LiDAR point clouds, support for both above- and below-ground infrastructure, gaming engine support (such as Unity or Unreal Engine) for interactive 3D visualization, cloud processing for managing, processing and querying massive amounts of data, web and mobile access, and APIs for analytics.

From a technical perspective the acquisition made a lot sense because Bentley's ContextCapture (from the acquisition of Acute3D several years ago), which creates 3D meshes for both inside and outside buildings from aerial and ground photo images and LiDAR point clouds, has been used by Agency9 for many years as the basis for its visualization capabilities.

Proposed West Link tunnel under Gothenburg

The West Link (Swedish: Västlänken) is a railway tunnel under construction under central Gothenburg. As an example of its support for underground infrastructure the City of Gothenburg used CityPlanner to publish a 3D visualization of the planned tunnel going below the entire city which showed stations with points of interest with images in a slideshow. During the first 24 hours that the project was published on its web site, it had over 10,000 unique visitors.

October 15, 2018

At the Year in Infrastructure 2018 conference this morning, I heard a fascinating tale of two buildings in a talk by Tom Dengenis of SYNCHRO. which was recently acquired by Bentley. I had always wondered about an abandoned construction project in the middle of the City, London's financial district. Construction on the Pinnacle, at 22 Bishopsgate in the heart of the City and the now iconic Shard began about the same time in 2006. Both had significant demolition to do before commencing work, but the Shard had more. But what we heard this morning is that because the Shard construction team adopted an innovative approach to building the substructure called "top down bottom up", the construction team on the Shard managed to start on the superstructure six months ahead of the Pinnacle and to complete the project on schedule in July 2012. SYNCHRO provided the graphic simulation along with a real time based 4D BIM model for this project. In contrast construction on the Pinnacle was halted abruptly in 2007. The lesson here is that in today's competitive environment with project durations getting shorter and shorter, being innovative in design and build is essential, an approach that Bentley calls constructioneering.

After construction was abruptly halted on 22 Bishopsgate, the site remained deserted with a seven story core concrete structure which came to be known as the "Stump". In 2015 the superstructure of the Stump demolished to be replaced by a classic American-style, big floorplate building which will be second highest building in Europe (after the Shard) but which will be the most uninteresting building from an architectural perspective in the City - the City is the site of several iconic buildings including the Cheesegrater, Walkie-talkie, Scalpel, and the Gherkin.

October 03, 2018

Many see handheld scanners as revolutionizing the construction sector. Portable and handheld laser scanners offer millimeter accuracy and can be used for engineering purposes. Cameras with less precision are being used for rapidly documenting a construction site for a variety of purposes. Most recently a couple of startups Cupix and HoloBuilder are lowering the bar by offering cloud software for the AEC industry to enable images of a construction site to be captured with a consumer grade 360° camera like the Ricoh Theta S or V. Walking through a construction site capturing 360° images along the way and uploading the images to the web is all that is required to create 3D walk-throughs of a site. The 3D walk-through can be used to measure dimensions, it can be annotated, it can be compared with a BIM model, and 3D images captured at different times can be compared to monitor construction progress.

For engineering purposes, handheld laser scanners provide the requisite precision but are relatively expensive. The scanning process requires time and produces large point cloud files and imagery that need to be managed and processed for visualization.

The Leica Geosystems BLK360 weighs a mere 2.2 lbs (1 kg), is incredibly small 6.5 x 4 inches and lists for US$16,000. It is a full laser scanner and imager, capturing 360,000 points/second with a range of 0.6 - 60 meters. The scanner can be attached to a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet to visualize what you have scanned. Up to 16 of these can be used at the same time.

Dot Product DPI-8 and DPI-8X (short range) are multi-sensor devices (IR laser and photo cameras). Targeted at professionals, especially in the engineering and construction sector, the devices incorporate SLAM technology and works with Android handhelds. All the processing is done locally on the handheld - no cloud processing is required.

The Faro Freestyle can scan objects within a range of half a meter to 3 meters away with a resolution of better than 1.5mm with a image point density of up to 45,000 points/m² at 0.5m and up to 10,500 points/m² at 1m. The scanner is attached to a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet for visualizing the point cloud as you scan.

For rapid site documentation, Matterport allows you to scan a floor of a building in an hour or less, upload the captured data to the cloud (Amazon Web Services) and a couple of hours later have a fully-rendered 3D walk-through that can be accessed over the web. It was originally targeted on the real estate sector but recently has been showing up at construction industry and other events including the recent BIMForum in Las Vegas. It provides a dollhouse view to see a whole floor at once, an inside view for walk-throughs, and a floor plan view for a traditional top-down perspective. It relies on IR and photo cameras and multiple scans in each room - scanning every 1.5 to 2.5 meters. It is capable of rough measurement, but not for engineering or construction purposes. Its biggest advantages are the speed with which you can scan a site and the small size of the resulting file which has to be uploaded to Matterport's cloud site. In addition to real estate and construction site documentation, it is used by FM professionals who need a 3D context for facilities management. For example, it can provide a mechanical room walk through with tags on different pieces of equipment and a way of directing anyone to any location in the facility. The camera is several thousand dollars and cloud processing requires a subscription.

The most recent additions to the technologies that can be used to document a construction site are Cupix and Holobuilder which lower the bar by only requiring a consumer grade 360° camera such as a Ricoh Theta. In the case of Cupix cloud processing requires a subscription. Similarly to the Matterport, you walk through the site capturing images with 360° camera as you go. The resulting images are uploaded to the Cupix site and the result is 3d tours or walk-throughs accessible over the web. You can compare 3D tours taken on different days to monitor construction progress, compare a 3D walk-through with a BIM model (Revit or IFC) you have uploaded, and measure dimensions with a precision of 1% or better at 20 meters. To reach this level of precision in measurement requires including a marker when taking pictures. Alternatively if a dimension is known it can be used to scale the entire walk-through. Cupix can use images captured indoors and outdoors. Cupix says that if GPS metadata is available from the photos, they can georeference the walk-throughs and generate a KML file. I used Cupix with a low cost 360Fly4K camera and a Samsung Note 5 phone to capture the interior and a bit outside of a cabin in a nearby park. It took a couple of attempts to get the correct spacing between camera placements in capturing 360° images, but after that it was straightforward. I uploaded a rough picture of a floor plan and I was able to walk-through the resulting 3D tour using the Cupix web viewer. Without doing anything additional I was able to get rough measurements accurate to about 5%. Cupix only requires a consumer grade 360° camera. A subscription is necessary for cloud processing. Cupix is targeting a broad market including travel and hospitality, real estate, and arts and culture in addition to the AEC industry

I just came across HoloBuilder at the recent BIMForum in Las Vegas. Like Cupix it only requires a consumer 360° camera. At first glance it appears to be focused on the AEC industry and makes creating and managing 3D tours of construction sites very easy. It offers 360° SiteStream which is a unique live streaming solution for real-time construction progress monitoring in 3D that runs as a plug-in app on the Ricoh Theta V.

June 23, 2018

The BS 1192 suite of guidelines and best practices developed under the auspices of the BSI, the national standards body of the UK, are designed to help the UK construction industry adopt BIM Level 2 and applies to both building and infrastructure assets. These standards target 33% savings over the full life-cycle of a building or infrastructure asset. BSI has announced that beginning this year the BS 1192 British standards will become international ISO standards.

An introduction to BIM Level 2 for folks for whom BIM is new can be found here.

BS 1192 (2007 + 2016)

The principles for information sharing and modelling of BIM Level 2 are outlined in this standard. BS 1192 provides a ‘best-practice’ method for the development, organization and management of production information for the construction industry and provides the template for common naming conventions and approaches to collaborative working for use in architecture, engineering and construction. It is also designed to assist efficient data use in facilities management.

Will be replaced in 2018 by;"BS EN ISO 19650–1 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 1: Concepts and principles."

PAS 1192-2 (2013)

PAS 1192-2 focuses on project delivery, specifically, the graphical data, non-graphical data and documents that are accumulated from design and construction activities.

Will be replaced in 2018 by;"BS EN ISO 19650-2 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 2: Delivery phase of assets."

PAS 1192-3 (2014)

PAS 1192-3 addresses the recognition that the cost of operating and maintaining buildings and facilities can represent up to 85% of the whole-life cost of a facility. PAS 1192-3 provides guidance to asset managers on how to integrate asset management during operations and maintenance with the accumulation of information about assets during design and construction. The UK government has targeted cost savings of 33% across the entire life-cycle of a facility by implementing the processes outlined in PAS 1192-2 and PAS 1192-3.

Will be replaced in 2020 by;"BS EN ISO 19650-3 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 3: Operational phase of assets."

PAS 1192-5 (2015)

PAS 1192-5 outlines the cyber-security vulnerabilities to hostile attack when using BIM and provides an assessment process to determine the levels of cyber-security for BIM collaboration which should be applied during all phases of the life-cycle.

Will be replaced in 2020 by;"BS EN ISO 19650-5 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 5: Specification for security-minded building information modelling, digital built environments and smart asset management."

The announcement by the BSI did not include two other parts of the suite;

BS 8536-1 (2015) aims to involve the operator of the facility from the outset by documenting building performance requirements early in the design phase to ensure that designers design for optimum performance of a facility.

Mark Enzer, chief technology officer at Mott MacDonald UK and proposed chair of the Digital Framework Task Group (DFTG) which is tasked to drive these reports’ implementation forward in his keynote at Geo Business 2018 in London, explained that there will be a greater focus on existing infrastructure. Digital abundance where the cost of everything digital has dropped dramatically over the last couple of decades has transformed many industries from banks to airlines automobile manufacturing. Construction represents about 10 % of GDP and construction productivity has plateaued over the past 40 years whereas general industrial productivity has doubled. Mark pointed out that the UK has primarily mature infrastructure to maintain and operate and construction has to change to reflect this.

Based on the concept that data in the form of a national digital twin is just as important as phyical assets, digital delivery and physical delivery go hand in hand. Key to digital delivery are BIM, geospatial, a common data environment, and asset information management. A national digital twin would include above and below ground assets.

Managing this data is about making sense of it for better decision making. Fundamental to this process is rethinking value, not just the value of a finished building or infrastructure asset, but output per ‎£ over the entire lifecycle of an infrastructure asset. This means moving beyond BIM Level 2 to full lifecyle BIM including operate and maintain.

A coordinated digital transformation landscape is required to achieve this digital transformation strategy for economic transformation. He sees the many organization in the UK infrastructure and construction sector coalescing around ICG, representing Highways England, Network Rail, Crossrail, Highspeed Rail 2 (HS2), Heathrow Airport and others and Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) representing the UK BIM Alliance and others to enable this to happen. The Centre for Digital Built Britain is a partnership between the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and the University of Cambridge to deliver a smart digital economy for infrastructure and construction for the future and transform the UK construction industry’s approach to the way the UK plans, builds, maintains and uses its social and economic infrastructure.

November 07, 2017

At the Fall BIMForum/BuildCon conference in Dallas, an entralling presentation about how HD BIM was used to build five buildings of the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada in record time was given by Greg Luth of Gregory P. Luth & Associates (GPLA). HD BIM is "high definition building information modeling" and refers to BIM modeling that is detailed enough (LOD 400) that what are called "shop drawings" can be produced from the BIM model. Shop drawings include, literally, the nuts and bolts for structural steel and rebar in the case of reinforced concrete structures.

GPLA is a structural engineering company which has comprised between 10 and 16 engineers at different times. Greg described a number of projects that GPLA had completed using the HD BIM approach. The first in 2006 was the USC School of Cinematic Arts where the HD BIM approach proved itself very successfully saving 20% in costs and 30% in time.

The Tesla Gigafactory project involved five buildings, 3.5 million square feet, 32,000 tons of structural steel, and 2,500 tons of rebar. All the steel and rebar shop drawings were produced from the BIM model. The structures for all five buildings were delivered only seven months after GPLA received the first telephone call from Tesla.

September 27, 2017

Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20% from 1990 levels by 2020

Increase the share of renewable energy sources in energy consumption to 20%

20% increase in energy efficiency

The legislation driving the 2020 goals are the Effort Sharing Decision, Renewable Energy Directive. and the Energy Efficiency Directive. The EU is on track to meet the 20% target for 2020. In 2015, EU emissions were already 22% below 1990 levels. According to national projections, emissions will further decrease until 2020 and showing a significant overshoot of EU 2020 goals.

As an example the largest member state, Germany, has about 1.7 million non-residential buildings. Of these office and administration buildings comprise the largest share(22%), retail (14%), agricultural (14%) and hotels, cafés and restaurants (13%). Public buildings of the federal, state and local Government are about 20% of all non-residential buildings by floor area. Efforts to reduce energy consumption in buildings 2000 to 2012 resulted in a decline in space heating consumption from 205 kWh/square meter/year in 2000 to 147 kWh/square meter/year in 2000 in 2012. The central goal of the German Federal Government is to further reduce the heating requirements of new and existing buildings to achieve a nearly carbon neutral building stock by 2050.

Under the Paris agreement, the EU has agreed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030. In addition, the EU also has targets for renewable energy and energy savings of at least 27% by 2030. The Paris Agreement obliges the EU to review its legislation to achieve the 2030 targets before 2018 when world leaders will gather to assess progress in its implementation. According to Member States' projections based on existing measures, in 2030, the total EU emissions are estimated to be 26 % below 1990 levels. Therefore, new mitigation policies are being put in place so that the EU target of at least a 40 % domestic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 in reached in 2030. A 2017 survey has found that nearly 90% of EU citizens believe it is important for their national government to provide support for improving energy efficiency by 2030.

Energy efficient buildings have been one of three priorities in the EU to meet 2020 emissions goals and this will be intensified to meet the 2030 goals. The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), have been the legislative drivers for improving the energy efficiency of buildings. In Western Europe intelligent building technologies and net zero energy buildings are key to meeting energy efficiency goals. A new Navigant Research report analyzes the market for energy efficient building technologies in Western and Eastern Europe with a focus on HVAC, lighting, building controls, water efficiency, water heating, and building envelope. According to Navigant Research, energy efficient building technology spending in Western and Eastern Europe reached $83.5 billion in 2017. It is projected to grow steadily to $111.9 billion by 2026.

July 05, 2017

There has been impressive progress in developing open standards for the integration of geospatial and AEC (architecture, engineering and constcruction) views of city infrastructure which provides a standards-based basis for full-lifecycle management from design through to operations and maintenance of infrastructure projects.

At GeoBusiness 2017 in London, Nigel Clifford, CEO of the Ordnance Survey, described a project that is intended to create a smart city model for four square kilometers of Manchester called cityverve. The objective is to apply Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to a real city. It is supported by Manchester City Council, Manchester Science Partnerships, the University of Manchester, Ordnance Survey, Cisco, BT and other tech players and well as government and Innovate UK. It is intended to provide an open platform of platforms. Among the fundamanental things that will be required to do this is open standards for modeling city infrastructure and to make this accessible to the geospatial and AEC communities.

Years ago private Dutch engineering and construction companies began adopting an integrated geospatial/BIM approach to construction. I blogged previously about the firm Royal BAM Group nv / BAM Infraconsult that adopted integrated BIM and GIS because many of its projects require full life-cycle BIM. At the first GeoBIM conference in Amsterdam, Jothijs van Gaalen gave some real world examples of Design, Build, Finance and Maintain (DBFM) highway construction that included GIS+BIM integration. BAM's motivation for investing in BIM+GIS are market developments especially more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project. As another example, ARCADIS Netherlands has delivered a number of projects that integrate geospatial into the design process.

The Netherlands has also led in the development and application of open BIM/geospatial standards‎ in the construction industry including NL/SfB, BS&I, ETIM, CB-NL, IMGeo, CityGML, NLCS, GB-CAS, COINS, IFC, VISI, SALES, National Model BIM Protocol, and National Model BIM Implementation Plan. The Netherlands has created a BIM Loket (BIM Gateway) that is intended to be a national portal for information about BIM and open BIM standards in the Netherlands including related geospatial standards.

In the AEC world Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) are the open and neutral data format standard for the exchange of building information models (BIM) that is widely used in the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) sector. The IFC standard was developed and is supported by buildingSMART International. The IFC BIM standard is used in the construction industry in many countries and is mandated in some such as Finland. The first versions of IFC were intended for buildings (vertical BIM). Recently buildingSMART initiated the IFC for Infrastructure project to extend the IFC standard to support linear transportation infrastructure (horizontal BIM or BIM for Infrastructure) such as rail, road, bridges, and tunnels.

In the transportation infrastructure world the widely used LandXML standard, which is supported by 800 members in the roads and highway transportation sector, includes alignment, road, rail, survey, terrain, land parcels, drainage, wastewater, and water distribution systems. LandXML is not associated with a recognized international standards organization and has had limited support for the past few years.

In the geospatial world a widely used international geospatial standard for cities is CityGML. Thomas Kolbe and co-workers are the developers of the CityGML standard that has been adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium. Kolbe et al. are translating a vision of the city as an interactive system comprised of functional components, utility networks connecting components, and interdependencies between utility networks into standards-based intelligent models that can be used to analyze urban environments for a variety of purposes including risk- and disaster management energy consumption, carbon balancing and city life-cycle management.

Currently CityGML includes 3D geometry, topology, semantics, and appearance for urban environments. CityGML also supports a standard mechanism for adding extensions, called Application Domain Extensions (ADEs). There are several Application Domain Extensions (ADEs) that have been developed to extend CityGML to other domains. For example, I blogged about a basic extension UtilityNetworksADE that was proposed for city utility networks. The INSPIRE Data Specifications Annex III contains use case encodings and a data model for Buildings the development of which was strongly influenced by CityGML. There have been attempts to integrate or at least develop a mapping between IFC and CityGML.

The major breakthrough in bringing the architectural and geospatial views onto a common footing is the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model developed by the OGC in cooperation with buildingSMART International and approved as an OGC standard in August, 2016. LandInfra was developed by Bentley Systems, Leica Geosystems, Trimble, Australian Government Department of Communications, Autodesk, Vianova Systems AS, and buildingSMART International and provides a unifying basis for land and civil engineering standards including the OGC's InfraGML and buildingSmart International's IFC for infrastructure standards.

buildingSmart International's IFC-Alignment project uses this common conceptual model of alignments for roads, railways, tunnels and bridges. The objectives of the IFC-Alignment project is to enable the exchange of alignment information through the full infrastructure lifecyle from planning through design and construction to asset management. A Candidate IFC-Alignment Standard is open for review now.

InfraGML is the OGC's application schema supporting land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities. InfraGML supports a subset of the existing LandXML standard. InfraGML is comprised of several parts;

At GeoBusiness 2017 in London, Phil Jackson of buildingSmart UK and UK Representative Infrastructure Room provided an update on the progress in extending IFC for infrastructure based on a common BIM/geospatial conceptual model;

Linear alignments for road and rail - under deployment testing

Common infrastructure architecture - developed jointly with OGC

IFC for rail - an initial Chinese specification has been published

IFC Bridges - just started

and several more are in active planning or ready to start;

IFC for ports and harbours - starts this summer

IFC for roads - ready to start

IFC tunnel - planned

Thus it appears that building geospatial and AEC standards for transportation and land management based on a common conceptual model and developing in parallel is well advanced.

June 15, 2017

At HxGNLive in Las Vegas this week a very interesting presentation with practical implications for anyone involved in construction, whether buildings or horizontal infrastructure was provided by Stanley Lawrence, Reid Flamm, and Michael Moore of Datum Tech Solutions, a Hexagon partner who focus on bridging the divide between the model and the field for owners. They described a very practical approach applying laser scanners to ensure that the owner is reassured during construction that what is actually being built is what was designed . Since this is a Hexagon event they reported used Leica ScanStation P30/P40 scanners with Cyclone software. The model is designed in Revit. I expect the process is general and could be used with other hardware and software.

The detailed process involves setting up the scanner and capturing control points and then performing scans. The point clouds are imported into Cyclone and then exported to a PC. The data is registered and aligned and a ModelSpace coordinate system is setup for Revit. The scanned data and coordinate system are imported into Revit using CloudWorx. The scanned data is used to manually create a level of detail (LoD) 350 Revit model. To verify that their model accurately reflects what was scanned, they take their scanned data back out into the field and verify it with a Total Station. Then they use Autodesk Point Layout (APL) to compare what has been built to what was designed and look for divergences.

They report that this process is very efficient so they are able to carry out scans frequently during construction to catch problems early. For example, they will scan right after pouring concrete for floors or after installing electrical wiring, plumbing or HVAC for a floor. In addition to keeping the owner in the loop during construction, at the end of construction they are able to provide the owner with scans of the final building. They also can provide scans from during construction to provide digital "as-builts" of hidden infrastructure such as electrical wiring, HVAC and plumbing. Owners find that this information is useful for facilities management during operations and maintenance.

June 12, 2017

At GeoBusiness 2017 in London, Hugh Boyes, a Cyber Security specialist outlined some of the security risks of digital engineering and the importance of cybersecurity for engineering projects. BIM models, floorplans and 3D LiDAR scans of sensitive buildings and infrastructure can often be found on the web. He mentioned the floorplan of a major police station, a BIM model of a young offenders facility, and a BIM model of the Victoria Underground station. All of these could potentially be very useful to anyone interested in disrupting infrastructure. It is well-known that mapping underground infrastructure reduces risk during construction and also during disasters, natural and man-made. However, it can also provide information about sensitive infrastructure. Hugh mentioned substations as particularly sensitive elements of the energy grid. With traditional centralized generation, substations are critical elements of the grid and are particularly vulnerable. In many countries disrupting a small number of large substations can leave significant parts of the country without power. (An advantage of a decentralized grid comprised of many microgrids with their own generating and storage facilities is that it is much less vulnerable.)

For people who are designing and building sensitive infrastructure using BIM, he recommended following the PAS1192-5 guidelines and incorporating security into the design from the start. PAS 1192-5 specifies processes which will assist organizations in identifying and implementing measures to reduce the risk of loss or disclosure of information which could impact the safety and security of personnel and users of infrastructure or the built infrastructure itself. PAS 1192-5 is applicable to any built asset or portfolio of assets which is deemed sensitive. It is for use by asset owners and organizations involved in the design, construction, maintenance and management of built assets, especially those who wish to protect their commercial information and/or intellectual property. Hugh is the joint technical author of BS PAS1192-5 - Specification for security-minded building information modelling, digital built environments and smart asset management.